Anyone know of a way to track down what packages are dependent on others?

After an emerge rsync, update world is suddenly trying to install reiserfsprogs, while none of my partitions even use that fs. It's also not a use variable (if it is, -reiserfs has no effect on this dependency). Now I have to figure out which program is so sure it can't live without some fs tools that have no place on my machine.

As long as every package maintainer and his hamster intends to add new dependencies on every second update, We're really going to need a way to track down reverse-dependencies. qpkg and epm from gentoolkit were less than helpful in this regard.

emerge -p -e provides a package's dependencies (forward dependency), but not what packages depend on it (backwards dependency). AFAIK, there is no way to get backwards dependencies in portage.

Thanks Garreth, that'll work for now. Though I still want to discover what package is trying to force the install, so I can find out which package maintainer needs a reminder about why defensive programming is so important.

No package to my knowledge is. Gentoo thinks that it is part of the base system. That file holds the list for 'emerge --update system' and thinks that you need reiserfsprogs for your base system. Don't ask me why though.

If so, it'd be pretty easy just to make a script that does a "emerge -s "*" | grep -i "*" | awk '{ print $2 }' and somehow send that information through emerge to do a pretend on all of them to see what each have as a dependency. and so on.....

sure, would take a while the first time, could always store it in a flatfile database (comma-delimited of course.. unless you want to add SQL-server querying to the script) but after that it's nothing but searching out the flatfile for your favourite app and showing what depends on it right below it. example of a flatfile would be: qt3:kde3,qtdesigner,qtarchitect
program is qt3, stuff that depends on it, kde3, qtdesigner, qtarchitect. of course, there is more than that depending on QT, but you get the idea.

Anyone know of a way to track down what packages are dependent on others?

After an emerge rsync, update world is suddenly trying to install reiserfsprogs, while none of my partitions even use that fs. It's also not a use variable (if it is, -reiserfs has no effect on this dependency). Now I have to figure out which program is so sure it can't live without some fs tools that have no place on my machine.

As long as every package maintainer and his hamster intends to add new dependencies on every second update, We're really going to need a way to track down reverse-dependencies. qpkg and epm from gentoolkit were less than helpful in this regard.